Re: [reiserfs-list] Re: Apparent instability of reiserfs on 2.4.1

[Hans Reiser <reiser@namesys.com>]

Chris Mason wrote:
> 
> On Monday, February 12, 2001 11:42:38 PM +0300 Hans Reiser
> <reiser@namesys.com> wrote:
> 
> >> Chris,
> >>
> >> Do you know if the people reporting the corruption with reiserfs on
> >> 2.4 were using IDE drives with PIO mode and IDE multicount turned on?
> >>
> >> If so, it may be caused by the problem fixed by Russell King on
> >> 2.4.2-pre2.
> >>
> >> Without his fix, I was able to corrupt ext2 while using PIO+multicount
> >> very very easily.
> >
> 
> I suspect the bugfixes in pre2 will fix some of the more exotic corruption
> reports we've seen, but this one (nulls in log files) probably isn't caused
> by a random (or semi-random) lower layer corruption.  These users are not
> seeing random metadata corruption, so I suspect this bug is different (and
> reiserfs specific).
> 
> > Was the bug you describe also present in the 2.2.* series?  If not, then
> > the bugs are not the same.
> >
> 
> In 2.2 code the only data file corruption I know if is caused by a crash....
> 
> -chris

Chris, your quoting is very confusing above..... but I get your very interesting
remark (thanks for noticing) that the nulls are specific to crashes on 2.2, and
therefor could be due to the elevator bug on 2.4.  It even makes rough sense
that the elevator bug (said to occasionally cause a premature write of the wrong
buffer) could cause an effect similar to a crash.  I hope it is true, let's ask
all users to upgrade to pre2 (a good idea anyway) and see if it cures.

zam is perhaps very clever for deferring working on this bug......:-)

Hans
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